


Cogito Ergo Sum

by floralstiel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Modification, Dubious Consent, Implied Underage, M/M, Mild Gore, Minor Character Death, Robot Castiel, Science Fiction, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 03:43:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/769577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/floralstiel/pseuds/floralstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I think therefore I am. René Descartes, and before him Plato and Aristotle spoke of the ‘knowledge of knowledge.’ If at a point in time a person thinks, therefore they can assume they exist at that time and moment. I think, I think constantly, therefore I exist on a constant stream of time. Do you think, Dean? Do you exist as I do? Or are you just a machine?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cogito Ergo Sum

**Prologue: March, AD 3153, North Block**

Times were hard for the people on the bottom. The big shiny new city flourished like a diamond in the middle of the desert, blinding and unattainable like a dream. Living there was like grasping smoke, impossible. Everything there was automatic, machines built machines—after humans had built _those_ machines—built machines, an endless cycle that hurt Dean’s head to think about. Too much power in the subtle hands of robotic parts that whirred and cycled day in and out.

Robots were tricky. There were the laws—of course there were the laws—that protected human beings from the things they made with their own filthy greedy hands. But how could something built with such intentions remain pure and unfeeling and focused? How could it not take on the traits of its creator? How were robots different from the things that made them?

Humans who lived in the new city were as cold and unfeeling as the robots that populated the underground workings of the city. They never looked down below their feet at the scum that lived there, the scum like Dean and the other boys and girls that ran wild in the old city, the slums. Nothing better than a garbage heap died tan from the sun and age, covered in a layer of sand and dust was their home. The children of the old city were like packs of wild dogs, allowed to run and scavenge and fight to their hearts’ content. Dean never let Sammy run with him; he kicked him until he tearfully agreed to stay behind with their mother and father, before their mother died anyway.

Sammy was too little. The slums would eat him whole and spit out his bones before he could even scream. Dean had seen it. He’d seen the naked bodies floating in the poison river, upside down and bloated, sometimes missing parts like arms or legs, sometimes everything from in their guts was gone, like their hearts and lungs and things. Dean knew who took those things and what they were for too, and he tried to stay away from the west side of the slums, that’s where the gangs played. No place for little boys playing at war with sticks.

What Dean tried to do was stay under the radar. He succeeded for most of his life, living with his father in east side, even after Sammy left and it all went bad. He tried to stay out of people’s way, tried to stick to the slums where he belonged. He used to walk the streets paces behind his dad, picking up scraps, stealing from the pockets of those who looked a little better off than they were. They picked their way through the early years of Dean’s life, like vultures, or maggots.

He tried to visit Sammy once, only once because he was beaten nearly to death on the outskirts by some rich punk kids who took one look at him and decided he wasn’t worthy of setting foot into _their_ city. As if they built it, as if they were one of the children forced into labor, working every waking hour till they grew and rebelled and ran off. Dean had been one of those children, same as his father. He had worked from dawn to dusk, toiling in the dust and mud and heat. He watched boys weaker than he was fall to the ground, dead where they lay. He saw them and they were Sammy in his eyes.

Sammy would have been, if Dean hadn’t protected him and hid him when the probes came around sniffing for fresh boy meat and Dean had hit them with a metal rod till they flew off, beeping erratically. Sammy loved him then, Dean thought, because Dean was the only thing keeping him alive and the only thing keeping him clean and fresh and above the grime and stink that was the slums. Now his Sammy was in that flashy gaudy thing built with his own two hands and he couldn’t even get in to see him succeed, to see him thrive in a way he never would have in the slums.

Dean had to do things to survive that he could never tell Sammy. Things were fine for a while, when the gangs stayed on the west side and the beggars and the poor people stayed on the east side. As Dean grew, things started to change. Lines were redrawn, people started shifting. On the way back from the fish market Dean saw a group of kids running after an old woman, kicking at her feet until she dropped her basket full of bread loaves and ran as fast as her old feet could carry her. The kids set on the bread like they were sharks on bleeding out prey. A yellow bandana or strip of cloth was tied to each of their skinny arms, and Dean grimaced. The Demons wore yellow. The Demons were a gang from west side, and they were notorious for starting young, picking up the dregs of the city to bolster their ranks. Their leader was a guy called Yellow-Eyes. Dean had seen him once before, he didn’t like the look of him, and he didn’t like how when their eyes met he felt a shiver of something cold sliding down his spine and the man had smirked and nodded in Dean’s direction. Two of his lackeys glanced his way and cackled like hyenas. Dean walked away. He didn’t look back. Dean had stayed far away from them. They weren’t worth getting into.

He saw Yellow-Eyes several times after that. Each time he got closer and closer until one morning Dean left early to walk the streets and Yellow-Eyes was there, directly across the stretch of dirt that counted as a street, watching him leave the shop. Dean locked the door behind him, offering the man his back. Dean wouldn’t show fear. He didn’t have any. When he turned Yellow-Eyes was gone.

He saw more yellow bands all around him, more than he wanted to see on the east side. It was like walking on the west side, in a sea of color and danger. It set his teeth on edge and the hairs on the back of his neck prickled everywhere he went. He tried not to pay attention to it. Gangs came and went, it was difficult to keep an eye on them all when allegiances changed faster than the weather. 

Dean got hurt. Of course he did, fights were as common as a sunny day, but sometimes they were bad, really bad, and Dean hardly left unscathed. His father was always there to help patch him up. And they had their tricks, their little secrets that they kept between them. Dean wasn’t a little boy, he wasn’t even a man, but he was far from normal. He couldn’t show it though, he couldn’t advertise that over half his body was fake. He couldn’t crush men’s skulls, but he could come close, but doing something like that would throw up too many red flags, too much suspicion, and in a city full of people that hated robots as much as they did, it would turn ugly real fast.

He was scarred enough to put off any suspicion, and he made sure to walk with a limp after a particularly brutal assault, and soon enough it was habit and he didn’t even need to remember. After that fight he had to replace the kneecap in his right leg and both the tibia and fibula too. It ached on the bad days, and soon he’d had to replace the whole leg, he knew he would, but he couldn’t find the right parts for it, not without rousing suspicion. He’d have to root around in the scrap cities a few miles west of the slums, but to do that he’d have to break in. He wasn’t up to breaking the law just yet, despite his less than kosher lifestyle. Until he was desperate he wouldn’t risk breaking into that place. He would just keep replacing and replacing until he couldn’t anymore.

Their shop was a simple little chop shop, it also served as a repair shop for the simpler machines that were in the slums. Humans were still too dependent on machines to live completely free of them, no matter how much they hated it. And machines broke down, so someone had to be there to fix them up. Dean spent his whole life working with simple machines, tinkering with them and learning not only to get better at his business but to get better at the upkeep his body required. Soon enough his body flowed as smoothly as natural muscle and bone could muster. He had practiced in front of a mirror for hours doing the simplest of things; speaking when he had to replace his jaw, blinking, smiling, walking when both of his legs were now completely artificial, working his joints and wrists, clenching and unclenching his fists and wiggling each of his fingers. He drilled simple ticks into his brain; coughing as if he was still breathing the foul air in the slums even though his new and improved lungs filtered the air for him, squinting in the sun even though his new optic centers behind his natural eyes dimmed the harsh light automatically, wincing with every blow even though he knew for a fact that it would hurt the other guy more than him. He played the part of a natural human, and he played it well.

Then one day it all went bad.

Dean woke to the smell of smoke and fire, and he immediately ran into his father’s room. The old man was already dead. Dean’s artificial lungs were the things that saved him from suffocating in his sleep. His eyes stung but he knew it wasn’t from the heat or smoke and he forced himself into a deep wet cough as tears ran down his face and he stumbled down the stairs. He wasn’t entirely surprised to see a few yellow-banded looters tearing apart his house, and he leaned against the wall, feeling that numbness that usually set in during a panic completely shatter when he thought about his father upstairs, laying dead in his own house. The yellow-bands saw him and they immediately set on him, punching and kicking, following him to the ground when he fell. They whooped and hollered when Yellow-Eyes himself walked through the door and took in the sorry state of the shop. He smirked down at Dean and said,

“I always get what I want.”

They looted the entire block then watched as it burned to the ground. Yellow-Eyes held him close the entire time, forcing him to watch when he saw children run naked through the streets, screaming and crying or laughing, depending on who was burning who. Dean didn’t even know up from down, right from wrong, and he watched a dog tear at a half-burnt corpse of a child; it looked like Sammy.

Yellow-Eyes took Dean with him when he went back west side. Dean was property now, he was arm candy—Dean knew he was pretty, had been told so too many times in his life to count—and he was a possession, and the man made him learn night after night after night. He took from him so often Dean came to expect it, to crave it. Yellow-Eyes—Dean learned his name was actually Azazel—didn’t even need to lock him in his room anymore. Dean would stay. He didn’t have anywhere to go. He didn’t have anyone looking for him, anyone to worry about. Sammy was safe, Dean told himself, Sammy was safe somewhere in that big city, making a name for himself, getting an education; maybe he already had a girlfriend. It was a bit much to expect from him, seeing as he only turned 16 a few months ago—Dean never forgot, he always hacked into the security program that prevented transmissions from entering the city and he always left him a message on his birthday, always—but Dean knew he would do great things, he was destined for it. Dean idly wondered if Sammy ever got his messages, and if he did, he wondered if Sammy would be concerned over not getting a message next year, or the year after that. He wondered if Sam even cared about him anymore.

Of course Azazel found out about his body, hard not to when you were fucking it every night for months. Azazel had gotten tired of all the normal positions, he wanted to get creative, and when he went to move Dean around without waiting for him to do it himself he frowned at how heavy Dean was. He investigated, and that concern turned to malicious glee. Dean was robo-whore, slut-machine, Azazel’s little windup toy. Dean covered his eyes and cried that night, for the first time in a long while. Azazel left him alone, out of pity or some other emotion Dean had no idea. Maybe Azazel would find him disgusting now and wouldn’t touch him, maybe he would let him go. Dean chuckled wryly at the thought. Azazel would kill him before he let him go.

Turns out nothing much changed. Azazel treated him a little differently of course, had to now that he knew Dean could crush him if he wasn’t careful. He convinced Dean to do the things he wanted, and Dean liked a few of them, it was a nice change, and a few of the things Azazel made him do actually put him in a more powerful position, not necessarily sexually dominant, just in a position that he could easily move from if things got to be too much. Dean wasn’t a little boy-toy, he weighed more than the average man, he could crush bone, he could breathe clean air, he could see in any quality of light, he could run for hours without tiring, and it was only a short while before Azazel realized what exactly had landed in his lap. A weapon with a pretty face.

“I got a contact,” Azazel murmured in his ear one night while he played with him, bringing him to the edge but not letting him fall yet, toying with him, “in the big city. She’s getting squeamish over helping an honest man like myself further my enterprise. I need you to go to her,” Azazel squeezed him and Dean keened, spreading his legs further in a desperate bid to relieve some of the pressure, “and get close to her, whatever means necessary, and steal the passes off her if she insists on being difficult.”

Dean nodded, licking his lips. He could do that. Getting into the city was no longer a problem now that he was “Yellow-Eyes’ boy.” Now that he knew Azazel was willing to let him wander around in the city whenever he wanted, wherever he wanted, he could find his Sammy, he could track him down, if only to just watch him for awhile. He wasn’t stupid, he couldn’t just walk back into his brother’s life like that, and he knew he would be watched by Azazel’s men. He was no better than a dog on a chain. He couldn’t draw that kind of heat onto Sammy, he got out, he got clean. Dean couldn’t drag him back down to his level of filth just because he wanted to see him again.

The passes, though, were what were important. The passes were what allowed you into the scrap cities. They were called scrap cities, but what was actually in them could hardly be called scrap. Quality parts were dumped there by the big manufacturing companies after upgrades rendered them obsolete, some with only slight flaws that could all be easily fixed. Dean had dreamed of going there himself, he wondered what sort of parts he could find that could help him relieve that ache in his right kneecap, or if he could find a better arm part that wouldn’t twitch every few days. His parts were unreliable as is, especially now that he couldn’t exactly give them regular maintenance. Even though Azazel knew about him, he didn’t really talk about it, or let Dean out of his sight for too long. In fact, letting Dean roam around in the city was the most freedom he had been given in years.

Five years had passed since Azazel took over the north block of east side, and in that time Dean had remained with him. Azazel let him leave every once in awhile to return to his old place to replace old parts if he could and perform minor tune-ups. Before Azazel hadn’t even let him do that, that is of course until his right arm almost popped out of his socket when the man was a little too overzealous in bed. After that Azazel encouraged Dean to take his little retreats, to allow him to convalesce and just take a break from it all. Dean enjoyed his little vacations, if only he didn’t have to return to his old place. It still smelled like fire and burning flesh.

Too many ghosts in north block. 


End file.
